Auto-tuning the JVM

Performance tuning allows us to improve the performance of applications. Doing performance tuning manually is not always practical due to the very large parameter space. Autotuning allows you to find best parameters automatically so as to optimize a given certain performance criteria.

OpenTuner is a tuning framework that allows you to automatically find optimal configuration and tuning parameters for a given application or program. It supports complex and user-defined data types and uses numerous search techniques to obtain the best combination of parameters that will result in optimal performance (i.e., total run time, average latency, throughput). OpenTuner has been used to tune seven distinct applications and the results show that it is possible to obtain up to 2.8x improvement in performance.

JATT, a HotSpot autotuner, has been designed specifically to autotune the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). In the following article we discuss some experience we gained while tuning an event-based solution using JATT:

Improving the Performance of a Real-Time Streaming Solution by Auto-Tuning the JVM